pmkiwi · HackerTrans

4 years agodiscuss

Some of the central beaches are sometimes crowded, but many beaches are just empty. Went for a swim today and water was fresh (16 degrees) but refreshing !

Where are you based ?

pmkiwi

4 years agodiscuss

NZ is not cheap indeed and Auckland is insanely expensive (managed to buy despite the crazy housing market), but nice beaches and awesome for sailing !

pmkiwi

4 years agodiscuss

creativenolo: former child :)

pmkiwi

4 years agodiscuss

So Auckland dropped 33 places just because of few Covid cases ? It is true that we had a peak of Covid cases this year, but it was never really massive by international standards.

At the same time, Auckland is pretty dead for a while now, especially the CBD. Traffic is not that bad, but we haven't recovered at all from Covid. We will see in the next few months if cruise ships and tourists are back or not.

pmkiwi

4 years agodiscuss

To be totally fair, the capital should be Nelson which is the true geographic center of NZ!

pmkiwi

5 years agodiscuss

Not only you do not have much time for yourself but it is often not really "quality" time. It rarely comes in uninterrupted blocks of say 90' or 2h. It is going to be 20 minutes there, 40 minutes there, and maybe 30 minutes over there.

I strongly agree with your point about bias. When I was not a father, I spent a lot of time studying (and passing) AWS certs and reached the point I got all of them. Now? I am happy when I read few blog posts each week and, very often, it takes several attempts to be able to fully watch a single re:Invent session.

"Yes, but you are reading and replying to comments on HN!"

Indeed, with my baby in my arms haha!

pmkiwi

5 years agodiscuss

Recently applied to a DevOps Engineer position and after multiple interviews (took ages to plan them...), I finally reached the take-home challenge stage. I have been tasked to work on something absolutely not related to the job, with a framework I have never heard of, and which has never been evoked during the interviews... what a trap!

I obviously failed miserably and they did not even follow up on the challenge even if they said they will... nice!

It is not healthy to set up the candidates to fail - at especially such a late stage - because you just waste everyone's time (especially your own employees'!). I do understand that the companies are trying to protect themselves against false positives, but it sometimes reaches some ridiculous proportions!

Since then, I have something else so happy end (at least for me because they still haven't filled their position...).

pmkiwi

5 years agodiscuss

This reminds me a colleague creating a Python class like this

import os

class Bla(): def __init__(self):

        self.var1 = os.env["VARIABLE1"]

        self.var2 = os.env["VARIABLE2"]

        # ...

        self.varN = os.env["VARIABLEN"]

    def get_variables(self):
        return self.var1, self.var2, ..., self.varN

They took 2 months to write an insanely complcated code to just copy few objects from an S3 bucket to another... And because the Lambda was timing out, they set the timeout to 15 minutes, leading to our Lambda costs skyrocketing because the function was failing/retrying all the time for some objects.

I was allowed to fix the timeout issue to save cost but I was forbidden to fix the code itself because our manager said "Well, it works so let's move on".

6 months later, on a Tuesday morning, bored, I decided it was enough so I rewrote this bloody Lambda in ~90 lines with a proper handler, retries, logging statements, etc ... in a couple of hours.

What did my manager say? "Good work but you should have taught them rather than doing it yourself".

pmkiwi

5 years agodiscuss

Yeap agreed! I discovered a lot of tools just reading them. Thanks everyone !!

pmkiwi

5 years agodiscuss

It is possible indeed that the Pfizer vaccine is not particularly efficient against Delta but, at the same time, Israel is only one country among a growing list of countries facing a new wave of Covid and what we can see over there does not show up (yet?) in other countries such as the UK or France.

Even if Dr Haviv is correct and the protection offered by the Pfizer vaccine is only valid for 7/8 months, many lives have still been saved in the meantime (Israel got almost no cases and deaths in Q2 2021 for example).

I guess more data is required to see how it goes but it is ackowledged that not all the vaccines have lifetime effects and some only work against specific variant (like the flu one).

To finish, I would like to reiterate that the Delta variant is a game changer so a quote from February needs to be taken with a grain of salt because the situation has changed completely since then.

pmkiwi

5 years agodiscuss

My understanding is that the vaccines are mainly here to avoid you to die or to require severe ventilation and, based on the available studies, they are doing the job.

The hospitalisation rates are way lower than any previous wave but the law of big numbers still apply at some point... And the Delta variant is clearly a game change here.

Finally, Israel is in a peculiar position because they have vaccinated - relatively speaking - quite a while ago so protection migh be indeed waning and the overall % is not that high (pretty surprised tbh).

pmkiwi

5 years agodiscuss

SF is located on fault, with mega wildfires and mega drought for decades to come... At least the photo of the empty reservoir will be taken with a cheap Chinese-made smartphone, good stuff!

Some peoples value other things than money so it is a bit silly to just talk about $$$. What about housing costs, commute, healthcare, quality of life, etc of the _general_ population (and not only developers)?

pmkiwi

5 years agodiscuss

If they go through MIQ first, all good!

pmkiwi

5 years agodiscuss

Fiji overtook Australia at the top of rankings for Oceania so it is not particularly a great period for them either :/.

French Polynesia is on the rise as well but NZ is holding so far!

pmkiwi

5 years agodiscuss

Recruiters are like realtor/real estate agents, they work for themselves (to close deals) and that's it. They never give you the appropriate level of information about the opportunity before you commit to a phone/Zoom call (yes sure, I am going to spend 30' talking to you rather than directly to the client...).

If you are not interested, their habit of asking you to help them doing their job is really annoying. The "if you know someone which might be interested by the opportunity, please let me know." is maybe the worse response ever.

I try to always reply by asking the name of the company, the job description, and salary ranges. And they almost never share these info but "we can discuss it over the phone because it is confidential". And my next reply is always "You know, an email is confidential too..." and that's generally ends the discussion until the next ping on LinkedIn. At least, they are rarely rancorous :)

pmkiwi

5 years agodiscuss

Location: Auckland, NZ

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: AWS (a lot!!), Python/Groovy/Bash/Git, CI/CD tools (mainly Jenkins and AWS Code* services), Conda/Maven/Gradle, IaC (CloudFormation, CDK, Troposphere, Terraform (a bit)), Docker/ECS/Lambda/Step Functions

Résumé/CV: available upon request - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pierremorvant/

Email: pierre.morvant [at] pm.me

10 year experience with almost 5 years experience with AWS (SA/DevOps pro certs and specialty ones). Started as Java developer (long time ago!) but quickly moved to DevOps as I love pipelines and workflows in general. Mainly working with Python 3/CDK today but keen to learn other languages/frameworks when using them make sense (Terraform/Ansible/Go/Typescript). Current title is Cloud DevOps architect but I do not mind coding as well.

Based in NZ, I would not mind working for Australia (West Island as we say ;)) and/or the US as the timezones are friendly if the working hours are flexible. Can also work for an EU based company but time difference (+10 at the moment) might be a problem :).

Ideally a working environment with excellent communications patterns and where people are keen to share and learn. Finally, I want to keep working with AWS technologies - ideally the serverless ones.